ABSTRACT
In considering the films of Larisa Shepit’ko (1938-1979) from the standpoint of water, it is tempting to begin not at the beginning, but at the end of her all too brief career. The film Shepit’ko had begun filming at the time of her death was to memorialize and lament the life of a Siberian village about to be drowned in the rising waters behind a hydroelectric dam. Based on Farewell to Matyora, a 1976 novel by Valentin Rasputin, and ultimately completed by her husband Elem Klimov, the film suggests the violation of both human and more than human communities in the massive engineering of hydrological systems. But the film also celebrates water, both as visual delight and matrix of life: from the opening shots rising from the sparkling translucence of the Angara River, to the moist, hummocky “mother earth” of the heroine Darya’s animistic prayer, to the final cosmic mist that surrounds the engineers attempting to force Darya at last from the island. The film (like Rasputin’s novel) precedes by decades the vigorous protests that have arisen against dam-building worldwide, from India to China and the US. What Paul Josephson has called “brute force technology” – massive dam projects – has agitated publics since at least the 1960s, with the building in Egypt of the Soviet-funded Aswan Dam (completed in 1970). Shepit’ko’s final film however was to show not the massive face of the dam itself, but the beautiful flowing water it would impound, and the centuries-and millenniaold forms of life that its building would bring to an end.
